Monarch of the Sands

A woman’s sultry and faintly disgruntled voice came down the line. ‘Who the hell are you?’

Frankie’s fingers tightened around the receiver; she felt fired up by some unknown instinct which had the little hairs on the back of her neck prickling. She wanted to say, “Who the hell are you?”, but something stopped her and that something was Zahid watching her very closely. ‘May I help you?’ she questioned politely.

‘Sure you can. I want to speak to Zahid.’

There was the briefest of pauses before Frankie spoke. ‘I’m afraid that the sheikh is unavailable at the moment.’ From the other side of the room, she saw Zahid raise his eyebrows in silent question. ‘But if you’d like to give me your name and number, I’ll make sure he gets it.’

‘My name is Katya,’ snapped the voice. ‘And he already has my number—tell him to damned well use it!’

The connection was broken abruptly and Frankie replaced the phone, looking up to find Zahid’s now inscrutable expression fixed on her. Her heart was thudding fiercely and she wondered who the woman with the sultry voice was.

‘Who was it?’ he demanded.

‘Katya.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘You didn’t bother checking whether I wanted to speak to her?’

Awkwardly, Frankie wriggled her shoulders. Had she overstepped the mark and allowed her feelings of undeniable jealousy to influence her reaction?

‘She sounded slightly … angry,’ she explained, in a sudden rush. ‘And I thought that the call might be of a personal nature, which you probably wouldn’t care to take in front of me. Alternatively, if I’d asked you whether you wished to take the call and you’d declined—then that would have been embarrassing for all three of us. I made a judgement, Zahid—which is presumably the reason you asked me to answer your phone.’ Tentatively, she chewed on her lip as he continued to stare at her in that expressionless way. ‘Was it the wrong one?’

There was a pause while he regarded her thoughtfully. A bold judgement, he thought as he met the question in her deep blue eyes. And a brave one, too. He saw the sudden flush of colour which had flared into her pale cheeks. Had she guessed that Katya was a lover? An ex-lover, he reminded himself as he shook his head.

‘No, it was not the wrong one—it was exactly right. I wanted to see whether you could think on your feet and it seems that you can,’ he said softly. ‘It’s a pity you couldn’t have been that insightful when you fell into bed with that creep Simon.’

For a moment, Frankie felt close to giving him a confessional, wondering if she should enlighten him about the laughably true nature of her relationship with Simon. But prospective employees didn’t suddenly start talking about their sex lives, did they? ‘It’s easy to be insightful when you’re acting for somebody else.’

‘Well, you’ve got yourself a job.’

‘I have?’

‘Don’t look so shocked.’ He gave a short laugh because it seemed that she hadn’t lost her ability to twist him around her little finger, after all. ‘It was pretty much on the cards all along.’

‘And what sort … what sort of job will it be?’

There was a brief silence as he allowed the long-standing glimmerings of an idea to float to the surface of his mind. ‘My father once kept a diary,’ he said slowly. ‘Did I ever tell you that?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Writing it became a kind of refuge for him,’ he continued. ‘Particularly in the troubled years during the wars and then when my mother became ill. And it suddenly occurred to me that you might be just the person to type them up for me.’

‘But I can’t speak your language,’ she objected.

‘He wrote them in English.’ He met her uncomprehending expression and shrugged. ‘It ensured their privacy—since most of my people don’t speak the language. I’ve been meaning to make them into a formal record for some time—the difficulty was in finding someone I could trust to do it.’ His black eyes gleamed. ‘And you, my dear Francesca, will be absolutely perfect for the task.’

Frankie blushed with pleasure—because praise from Zahid felt like the very best sort of praise.

‘Does that sort of role appeal to you?’ he questioned.

She nodded, trying not to be affected by the silken texture of his voice, but it wasn’t easy. ‘I’d like that very much.’ She hesitated. ‘You know, you haven’t even mentioned why you’re here—in England.’

He thought back to the working breakfast he’d had that morning with England’s leading horse-racing experts—and the similar meetings which had taken place in every major city in Europe. With an effort, he switched his attention away from the soft rose-pink of her cheeks and the sapphire gleam of her eyes.

‘I’ve been promoting the new horse-racing track and stadium we’ve almost completed in Khayarzah,’ he said. ‘One which will put us firmly on the international equestrian circuit. But this particular trip has also been personal.’ He walked over to the window and stared at a rusty barge which was chugging its way down the heavy grey waters of the Thames. He wouldn’t have discussed such a matter with anyone else, but his inherent trust in Francesca made him more candid than was usual. And didn’t it come as a kind of liberation—to be able to speak his mind for once? ‘I needed to meet with my brother,’ he said as he turned back to face her. ‘To see if he’s really been behaving as badly as the media suggest.’

Frankie saw the sudden tension which had tightened his face and she wrinkled her nose in question.

She’d only met his brother Tariq on a few occasions—and one of those had been at her father’s funeral, when she’d been too fogged down in grief to be able to think straight.